POLITICS is never far away in Washington DC. So I shouldn't have been surprised when, as a newly arrived DC resident, I discovered that the nearest shop - no, I should correct myself, nearest store - was a Safeway supermarket situated in the dim caverns of perhaps the most name-checked address in the environs. No, not the Capitol, or the White House or the Pentagon, but the Watergate complex.
When I was a journalism student in the mid-1970s, the Watergate story served as a role model for pioneering investigative journalism. All The President's Menwas required reading. We knew all the twists and turns in the labrynthine process by which Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, under the stewardship of doughty Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, helped to topple the Nixon administration.
But despite my familiarity with Watergate on the page, the building came as a terrible disappointment in the flesh. Completed in 1967 and dubbed a super complex at the time, it represents all that is bad about mid-20th-century architecture. Sitting on a 10-acre site, it is a series of rotundas of prefabricated concrete with mock-classical balustrades that look like they were imported from a garden centre. Developed on land bought from the defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the building was named after a terraced area just to the north of the Lincoln Memorial that leads down to the Potomac River. Who knew?
It was here on June 17th,1972, that five men, among them a former member of the CIA, were arrested in the early hours of the morning trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee. It was a time of heightened sensitivities for the Republicans. The Pentagon Papers, the US Defence Department's secret history of the Vietnam War, were being leaked to the New York Timesand the Washington Post. (The White House "plumbers" unit - charged with plugging leaks from the administration - had already burgled a psychiatrist's office to find files on Daniel Ellsberg, one of the architects behind the leaks.) If the Watergate five had not been caught, Richard Nixon might well have happily completed his second term and the face of US politics since then might have been completely different. As it was, the growing financial links between the Republican burglars and the president's re-election campaign, coupled with the discovery of the infamous White House tapes (a paranoid Nixon had recorded all his conversations and telephone calls since 1971) brought him down in August 1974 and assured the Watergate its place in political history.
Strangely, in a city of political monuments built to impress the citizen, the Watergate is both unremarkable and unremarked. Granted, it's on the national register of historic buildings and it features in the movie locations tour of the city, but otherwise there is no indication of its significance.
Watergate has become a by-word for political corruption; it merits a Webster's dictionary entry. The word "gate" has been appended to numerous scandals since, a password for all that is venal and corrupt in politics and a euphemism for high-level cover-up. Its latest manifestation is Troopergate - the investigation into the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's involvement in the firing of her Alaskan state trooper brother-in-law.
Not only has the "gate" tag entered the popular lexicon, but many of our current political terms - smoking gun, damage control, stonewalling and plumbers (not Joe) originate from the Watergate affair.
Meanwhile, the building has had several political after-lives. It was in her apartment here in 1998 that Monica Lewinsky was interrogated by investigators behind the Clinton impeachment, concentrating on that famed dress and the cigar. After the ordeal was over, Monica quit the Watergate apartments, leaving notes for her neighbours apologising for the publicity the Starr investigation attracted to the already notorious address. I hope you all know how very sorry I am that so much attention was brought to the building," she wrote.
In recent years, the Watergate has enjoyed more sedate political connections. Bob Dole, former Republican presidential candidate, has lived here. Condoleezza Rice still does; she holds regular musical soirées in the living-room of her apartment, spacious enough to accommodate her grand piano and the impromptu chamber music quartet she plays with. But the complex still attracts controversy: a major hotel development on the site due to be launched in 2009 was partly funded by the now defunct Lehman Brothers.
The last twist in the original Watergate story occurred three years ago when "Deep Throat", a background source who provided leads to Woodward and Bernstein at clandestine meetings in underground car-parks, was unmasked as 91-year-old Mark Felt, a former number two at the FBI.
But the building that has found its way into political terminology stands now as much as a folly of 1960s brutalist architecture as a symbol of the tainting of the American dream. That's not to say, however, that for this new resident of Washington there isn't still a frisson when she trawls the aisles of Safeway. Who knows what players one might be brushing up against and when history might repeat itself at this notorious address?
As the record shows, scandal in DC doesn't always happen in the corridors of power or behind closed doors. Maybe if Safeway doesn't turn up trumps, I should try hanging about in some underground car-parks?